The Orientalist and the Ghost (36 page)

‘It won’t work,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t give a toss.’

Adam listed the reasons why the hunger strike was stupid. First, Julia lacked will-power. Second, it would take a very long time, possibly weeks of self-punishment, before the results were visible. And third, and most important, blackmail is only effective when
you
threaten something that matters to the victim. Back in England life had been rife with rules and prohibitions. They’d had to clear their dinner plates of every last runner bean under pain of death. But here they could do as they pleased. Jaywalk across a six-lane motorway, dance naked with the beggars in the marketplace. What did Frances care, holed up in her room?

But Julia was undeterred. Barricaded in the bedroom, she refused to open the door when Madame Tay came knocking with cakes and sugar-cane juice, rattling the doorknob and crying,
Ju-li-aah, Ju-li-aah!
A two-litre plastic bottle was Julia’s companion throughout the hunger strike, filled hourly from the lukewarm bathroom tap. Lying on her bed, she drank until the bottle was empty and her bladder full, and another trip to the bathroom was necessary to reverse this state of affairs. The water-drinking regime continued until bedtime and Adam lost count of the litres that flushed through her internal plumbing. She was a human waterworks. Overflowing pipes and gushing spout.

‘Give it a rest, Julia,’ he said. ‘You’ll rupture your kidneys. People
die
from drinking too much water, you know.’

‘Good,’ said Julia, swigging from the bottle.

That night Julia’s stomach gurgled a lullaby and Adam was strangely comforted by the belly-burbling, drifting off to sleep full of gratitude to be well fed.

Day two of the hunger strike was also spent in the bedroom, guzzling water at a rate of two litres per hour and solving crossword puzzles. The Harelip Twins
called
for her, but Julia wouldn’t disrupt her ascetic regime to go out and play. She arranged her make-up like surgical implements on the dressing table and painted rainbows on her eyelids and a butterfly on her lips. She practised gymnastics. The splits, the crab, belly sloshing as she stood on her head then strode about on her hands. She peeled the scabs off her shins, nibbling them a little before stowing them away in a matchbox. She picked the hardened mucus out of her nostrils, ate it, and was then stricken by a purist’s guilt. She zipped herself into a musty old sleeping bag and wriggled caterpillar-like across the floor. Lying on her back, with the soles of her feet she climbed the walls.

On day three of the hunger strike Julia was tearful and fractious. When Adam strutted into the bedroom after lunch, patting his belly and yum-yumming about Madame Tay’s shrimp noodles, Julia shrieked at him and crawled, sobbing, under her bed. Adam wasn’t the least bit surprised when he heard her sneak out of the bedroom in the dead of night. He listened for the distant creak of the kitchen door, then crept after her. He caught her red-handed on the roof, juice and seeds dribbling down her chin as she devoured a crescent moon of watermelon. When she saw Adam she threw the watermelon rind on to the roof of the jeweller’s next door. Adam clicked on the light.

‘Watermelon’s ninety per cent water!’ she said, wiping her sticky fingers on her vest. ‘It doesn’t count as food!’

‘Yeah, it does. You wouldn’t catch Mahatma Gandhi
stuffing
himself with watermelon on a hunger strike.’

‘It’s not proper food, though – not the same as rice or potatoes …’ Drained of conviction, her voice trailed off.

‘C’mon, Julia. You’re starving yourself for nothing.’

Adam lit the stove to boil water. When the kettle whistled he made cocoa sweetened with condensed milk and raided the cupboard for biscuits. Julia leant on the balustrade, staring forlornly across the armada of rooftops. The night droned with air-conditioning units as they drank the chocolate and ate until all the Jacob’s cream crackers were gone. Julia put down her mug, wiping her chocolate moustache and the fine-beaded sweat off her face with her bandaged hand. She pushed some straggly hair out of her eyes and turned imploringly to Adam.

‘I’ve had a false start,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I’ll begin again tomorrow.’

Julia brushed the crumbs off her vest, scattering them into the alley below. They went back to the bedroom, and later, when Adam heard Julia snivelling in the dark, he really couldn’t understand why she was so powerfully convinced that their fate was determined by whether or not she starved.

24

THE FALLOUT CAME
without alarm bells or warning. They had been coming apart slowly for weeks, like icebergs in a semi-frozen sea, when Frances suddenly reversed, crashing full-speed into Sally, smashing their friendship to smithereens.

Sally was standing at a basin in the toilets, rinsing her sudsy hands under the tap. Along the row of mirrors Amethyst girls dawdled before morning registration, gossiping and fiddling with plaits and hair slides, cubicle doors opening and closing, lizards darting across the peeling paint of the walls. The toilets were dark and a strong chemical odour of bleach-mopped floors pulsed through the humidity (usurped, as the day progressed, by cigarette smoke breathed from inexperienced mouths, and other, more scatological fumes). As Sally stooped over the gushing tap, she felt a prod on her shoulder. She turned round.

‘Hello, Fra—’ The last syllable was knocked out of her as Frances shoved her in the chest, so her thighs bashed the basin rim. Sally’s hands flew up in self-defence, fingers webbed with soap suds. ‘What?’ she said.

Frances was puffy and tear-soaked, tiny blood vessels raging in the whites of her eyes. Her eyelids were swollen and discoloured, as if they’d been punched.

‘Why did you do it?’ shouted Frances.

‘Do what?’

‘You know what you did!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

The gossiping, mirror-gazing and hair-fiddling halted as the roomful of schoolgirl eyes pivoted towards the brawl. A flush chain was yanked and a cistern surged. Even as she stared, panic-fraught, into her best friend’s furious face, Sally was conscious of the visual comedy of the confrontation. Little Frances Milnar attacking her shy giantess friend like a scrappy Yorkshire terrier. As though provoked by Sally’s inner mortification, Frances shoved her again with both hands.

‘Liar!’

The word tore from her mouth; a bullet ripping into Sally’s vulnerable flesh. Her heart beat accelerated and her breathing wheezed. To push Frances away would require hardly any effort, but her arms hung like dead things by her side. She was conscience-stricken, guilty of her unknown crime.

‘I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘Well, congratulations. He’s leaving the school.’

‘Who?’

‘You know who!’

‘It had nothing to do with me!’

Frances slapped her. Sally was too stunned even to lift a hand to the scalded cheek. The toilet audience quivered in delight. The young ladies of the Amethyst school were unaccustomed to violence. Conflict among the girls was usually subtle, with harm inflicted via psychological means. The bell clanged for registration but no one moved.

‘You’re jealous,’ said Frances, calmer now, as if her hysteria had been dissipated in the slap, ‘so you had to ruin everything. You make me sick! Don’t ever come near me. Don’t you ever come near me again!’

Sally, shaking, her chin wobbling, was on the verge of tears. Frances barged through the gaggle of schoolgirls and out of the door. The girls swooped on Sally at once, cooing in sympathy and patting her arm, relishing the gossip to be spread. Sally had never been so popular.

‘Are you OK? Oh dear … don’t cry.’

‘Don’t worry, Sal. We all saw what happened. She was crazy! Like someone had spiked her cornflakes with acid! Don’t worry about her … That was assault. You could get her suspended for that … Do you
really
not know what you’ve done?’

One slap and a hot blast of fury, and Sally was back in the shoes of the timid nobody she’d been on her first
day
at Amethyst. Lessons passed in a trance, pen scribbling unthinkingly in her exercise book, the teachers’ mouths making unintelligible shapes and sounds. She mentally scripted powerful emotive speeches protesting her innocence and fantasized about Frances apologizing meekly for leaping to false conclusions, though these dreams of reconciliation were shattered by a mere sideways glance at Frances, seething like a swarm of wasps. During breaks Sally hid in a toilet stall, listening to the clatter of lavatory seats, jet-streams of pee, and the whispers of teenage girls rustling like taffeta skirts. She peeled the flaking skin from her lips as she hid, so by the afternoon her mouth was raw and bludgeoned-looking. When school was finally over, she was desperate to go home after the worst day of her life. But after a surreal interception at the school gates, Sally found herself at quarter past four in the bedroom of Delilah Jones, with Delilah and the Perak palm-oil dynasty twins Lillian and Meredith.

The Jones residence was on a hill overlooking the Lake Gardens. The girls sat on rococo-style chairs by the sunny ceiling-high window as a Bob Dylan LP spun on the record player (to which Lillian gyred her head, eyes slitted in pleasure, as though there was something tantric and mystical in the tambourine shakes, guitar strumming and the singer mumbling off-key). A Chinese servant in a traditional maid’s outfit entered and set down a silver tray of iced tea and sandwiches.
Thank you, Mimi
, said Delilah, and the servant departed without a word. (How professional, Sally thought
admiringly
, at the same time feeling an unprecedented pang of affection for the giggly Safiah and her never-combed hair.) As Delilah poured out glasses of iced tea and the heiress twins compared notes on the afternoon geography test, Sally gazed about the bedroom. Everywhere was startling evidence of the Amethyst Queen’s corporeality: rose-bud-studded bra strewn across the parquet floor; the sensuous disorder of bedsheets where she’d slept in the night; dressing table cluttered by perfume bottles, worn-down lipsticks and mascara-streaked cotton pads; hairbrush tangled with demerara-brown hair. Kandinsky posters were taped to the walls, as well as black-and-white prints of nude women (the lascivious array of buttocks and breasts confusing Sally – was Delilah a lesbian?). On the bedside table was a well-thumbed stack of
Time
magazine and
The Economist
. Unorthodox reading matter for a teenage girl.

‘Feel free to borrow anything you like,’ said Delilah, waving towards the bookshelves. Sally read the cracked spines: Miller, Lawrence, Kerouac, Burroughs … ‘I’ve dog-eared the pages with the dirty bits.’

When they’d descended on her at the school gates Sally had been afraid. Delilah’s smile was too bright for someone drenched and humiliated by a bucket of water only three nights before, and Sally declined the invitation to tea. But they’d pleaded and cajoled (
Oh, you simply must!
insisted the smiling identical twins) and Sally, who’d never acquired the skill of putting her foot down, gave in. Revenge seemed the most likely motive,
and
as they strolled through the old Colonial District Sally wondered what punishment they had in store. Were they going to shave her eyebrows? Force-feed her with slugs? Whatever it was, Sally knew she was defenceless. Resigned to her fate, she sat in the rococo-style chair, eating a dainty cucumber and salmon paté sandwich (despite her nervousness she was peckish) and waiting for Delilah and the twins to turn nasty. But Sally’s accosters remained perfectly congenial, grumbling about exams and parents and planning an outing to see
The Graduate
at the Federal Cinema. The twins ignored the sandwiches, cupid’s-bow lips puckering around the cigarettes they chain-smoked. They wore their hair in pigtails with cute little fringes cut an inch above their eyebrows, dextrous, finely plucked arches that leapt about the stage of their forehead in mesmerizing performance. Whereas Delilah discoursed lengthily in her deep intelligent voice, Lillian and Meredith were pithy and quick, squeaky as speeded-up tape recordings.

‘We’re going to toss a coin to see who gets Sebastian this summer.’

‘We took it in turns over Easter and wore the poor boy out!’

‘So tired he could barely lift his ski poles!’

‘Sebastian had no idea what we were up to.’

‘He thought we were both Lillian!’

‘We both fancied him.’

‘And we were brought up to share.’

‘Any other way would be selfish.’

‘You should see him, Sal! He’s scrumptious!’

‘We swapped every other night.’

‘Sometimes twice a night.’

‘Sebastian had dark circles under his eyes for two weeks.’

‘He used to be a real skirt-chaser, but now he wants to settle down with us.’

‘Sebastian wants to marry us.’

‘We can’t make up our mind.’

The twins chimed with laughter and Delilah smiled and rolled her eyes. Sally didn’t know what to think. Were they pulling her leg? Or were they really both sleeping with the Czechoslovakian ski instructor? Either way, they confirmed Sally’s deep-seated belief that identical twins are spooky and strange.